But, a lot of the verbs we use in everyday speech are irregular, so we need to learn them. And, the good news is that there are 1000s of regular verbs in English – far more verbs are regular than are irregular. Regular verbs are the easiest types of verbs to use in the past tenses. With regular verbs in English, we form the past tense and past participle by adding – ed to the end.

That way, we have something to compare them to. What is a regular verb in English?īefore we can talk about irregular verbs, we need to know what regular verbs look like.

If we add these to the more commonly accepted answer of 12, we get to 16.Do you want to learn more about irregular verbs in English? This is the blog for you! We can’t talk about all of the irregular verbs in English because there are far too many, but today you’re going to learn about the most common ones.

For example: I would dance I would have danced I would be dancing I would have been dancing. Verb tenses are sometimes shown with a conditional example for each aspect, usually including “would”. We won’t go into detail here other than considering the conditional mood. We know verbs have tenses and aspects, but they also have moods - more here. So, if we consider the 3 tenses – past, present, and future - and then introduce 4 aspects for each, we can, for simplicity, say there are 12 tenses. The aspect of the verb depends on whether an action as described by the verb is ongoing (progressive), completed (perfect), was ongoing but ended (perfect progressive), or neither ongoing nor completed – just a fact (simple). To get to the answer 12, we need to consider the aspect of a verb. Most books and guidance refer to 12 different verb tenses. However, most people, for the purpose of teaching English consider there to be 3 tenses – past, present, and future. To be linguistically precise, the only tenses in the English language are the present and the past with the future “tense” being formed using a helping verb. This is obviously not a helpful answer so let’s have a brief and simplified explanation. How many verb tenses are there in English?Ībove we’ve described 3 verb tenses, but the answer to this question is either 2, 3, 12, or 16 depending on who you ask.

Present past and past participle list